


Quiet and Kind

by partyghost (Arokel)



Series: Say What I Want [3]
Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Alex is so tired but he's a good bro, Bisexual Reggie Peters (Julie and The Phantoms), Coming Out, Everyone has a crush on Luke Patterson, Gen, Or had in Alex's case
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:13:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28307325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arokel/pseuds/partyghost
Summary: “Do I need to give another talk about how coming out is scary even if you know it’s going to go well?”Alex has a late-night conversation with Reggie.
Relationships: Alex Mercer & Reggie Peters (Julie and The Phantoms)
Series: Say What I Want [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2040685
Comments: 9
Kudos: 118





	Quiet and Kind

**Author's Note:**

> we have fixed the timeline and now everything is linear from here on out probably!
> 
> titles are hard but _Everything Possible_ by Fred Small is a great song

Alex tries to be a supportive friend. It’s the least he can do, after everything his friends have done for him, and he likes being a shoulder to lean on, being the person people come to with their problems.

But he’s getting kind of tired of these ‘hey Alex’s.

It’s quiet in the studio, and even if none of them really sleep anymore, they still haven’t totally kicked the habit of lying in a darkened room for at least a few hours every night. Alex, at least, sees it as a chance to just… be. Away from his friends, sort of; just… still. Quiet.

“Hey, Alex.”

The thing about Reggie’s ‘hey Alex’s is that they’re never the same. It could be ‘hey, Alex, I saw on the news that some horrible hate crime happened, are you doing okay?’ or just as easily ‘hey, Alex, the shawarma place was out of beef so I just got you falafel, hope that’s alright.’ There’s just no way to prepare yourself for it.

So Alex turns on his side, searching out the outline of Reggie’s body in the near-darkness of the loft, steels himself, and says, “yeah?”

It must sound more tired than he means it to, because Reggie is immediately apologetic. “Did I wake you up? Sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

“I can’t sleep,” Alex says, meaning _I can’t sleep anymore and neither can you, so no, obviously you didn’t wake me up._

“Lots on your mind, huh?” Reggie says. “I get that. I haven’t slept well in…” he trails off, and Alex is pretty sure it’s because he realized he isn’t making any sense and not because he honestly didn’t know the not-sleeping thing was a universal problem.

“Reggie, _what?”_

Alex thinks that about sums up his feelings.

“Sorry,” Reggie says again. “Never mind.”

So this is one of those ‘hey, Alex, I have a question but I’m worried it’s stupid, so if you give me any indication at all that you’re not interested, I won’t ask it’ _hey Alex_ moments.

“No, I’m up now,” Alex says, sitting up properly in his bean bag to emphasize that he is, in fact, up, and ready to have a sleepover-style heart-to-heart about whatever Reggie’s been stressing himself out over. Far be it from Alex to let one of his friends be anxious alone. “What’s up?”

“It’s stupid,” Reggie says, and yep, bingo, called it.

But even though Reggie is maybe the most sincere person Alex has ever met, he doesn’t always do so well with _other_ people’s sincerity. Alex has never figured that one out. He’s fine with Luke, because Luke is always sincere, but whenever Alex tries Reggie clams up.

So instead of assuring him that of course it’s not stupid, that if it’s bothering him then it’s important, Alex says, “half of what you say is stupid and you still say it. So shoot.”

Reggie is probably glaring at him, but it’s too dark to really make out facial expressions, so Alex chooses to believe he’s not. For a few seconds, the silence hangs tense between them, and Alex thinks Reggie really might just not say anything. But once the pause has run itself out and Alex still hasn’t let him off the hook with a joke or another insult, he relents. “It’s just… you know what I said, about masculinity?”

And of course Alex knows; how could he forget a single second of maybe the third-best night of his existence? He thought at the time that it was just Reggie being Reggie, showing off his newfound twenty-first century sensitivity. He just doesn’t know what _else_ it could be.

“Well, I sort of… I haven’t been honest with you, I guess,” Reggie says, turning his face away even though there’s no real point in it. Then again, Alex has always found it easier to look somewhere else during difficult conversations, too. Alex has a sinking feeling about this. “And I don’t know why.”

So yes, Alex thinks he maybe knows where this conversation is heading. And he thinks he probably doesn’t need to say anything to help it get there. If Reggie is trying to say what Alex thinks he’s trying to say, it’ll come out no matter what.

“I’m bisexual,” Reggie says on a breath. It’s almost choked, the kind of rushed exhalation that comes from saying something out loud for the first time, which Alex himself has sort of never done.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

And then Reggie grins, and _that_ Alex can see in the darkness.

That’s what it must feel like to come out on your own terms, he thinks. The relief of having finally said something because you know it’s the right time to say it, not because you were angry or scared or just tired of other people saying it for you. He doesn’t _begrudge_ Reggie getting to feel it, but… he’s a little jealous.

Jealousy isn’t going to make him act like an asshole about it, though, especially not to one of the two people who first made him feel like it was _okay_ to tell people. So he grins back and says, “cool.”

“Yeah, pretty cool,” Reggie says, laughing a little breathlessly. All the tension has bled out of his body and he’s propped sideways on one elbow, looking at Alex with an ease Alex can’t remember seeing in him for… years, god. Since before Alex came out. “Feels kind of silly that I was scared to tell you.”

“Do I need to give another talk about how coming out is scary even if you know it’s going to go well?” Alex says, but his lips are twitching too much for it to really sound as chiding as he means it to. The legacy of Elder Queer Alex lives on. Reggie laughs, too, and this time it’s free and easy and delighted, and Alex would trade a few hours of serenity for this any day or night.

“When did you start wondering?” he asks, because he’s curious. Something has always pinged his senses about Reggie, particularly after Alex himself came out. The way he is around Luke, too – even if there’s nothing special about Luke himself and it’s just a general anxiety, Alex knows that kind of half-flirtatious misdirection.

But what Reggie actually says is so out of left field that Alex is left almost speechless.

“It was you, actually.”

“ _Me?”_

How could Alex have missed that? _When_ had he missed that? At what point in the awful three years of feeling like he was totally alone in the world, or the following, less awful year of feeling like there was now an unbridgeable gap between his life and his friends’ – at what point in that time was Reggie feeling the same things? Alex is almost… angry. They could have commiserated, or – or he could have _helped,_ or –

But Reggie is here now, having these feelings now, and Alex can help him _now._

“I mean, only sort of,” Reggie says hastily. “I wasn’t like, pining or anything. It was just – I joked about it, about you being into me, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about what if you _were_ , what would happen, how would I feel?”

That makes sense. Alex remembers Reggie’s self-conscious joking, remembers thinking it was a little weird at the time. It’s a very Reggie thing to do, to work through his feelings out loud by making a joke out of them. Alex probably would have noticed it sooner if he hadn’t been too worried they were secretly Reggie being kind of not as chill with Alex coming out as he said he was.

“I wasn’t, for the record.”

Reggie grins, back to the open, easygoing Reggie Alex has missed, and punches him on the arm. “Yeah, I know. You were into Luke.”

Alex barely stops himself from throwing his hands up in theatrical frustration, because come _on._ “Did _everyone_ know about that?”

Reggie shrugs. “It just made sense,” he says cryptically. “But that wasn’t really – I could tell myself it was just curiosity, or that I was worried about it and that’s why I was thinking about it. I thought it was maybe a normal thing to realize your friend is hot once he comes out and sort of, I don’t know, forces you to think about him like that?”

And Alex _gets_ that, he does, he knows that rationalization game, and he shouldn’t laugh at Reggie for being confused.

It’s just that it’s _so funny._

“Well, okay,” Reggie says, put out. “I didn’t laugh when _you_ came out.”

Alex tries to be serious, takes deep breaths and holds his face muscles as still as possible. “Sorry, no, I know, bad form.” His mouth twitches back into a smile. “You know what’s funny though?”

“Me coming out to you?” Reggie grumbles, but he doesn’t sound like he’s actually all that upset about it.

“Do you know the minute I knew for sure I liked guys?”

Reggie scrunches his face up in an adorable picture of is-this-a-test sincerity. Alex knows it well enough to read it even in the dark. “I’m gonna guess you just looked at Luke one day and were so overwhelmed by his Luke-ness that it turned you off girls forever?”

There is _something_ in the way that Reggie so readily assumes everyone thinks Luke is hot. Alex isn’t sure what, but there’s something.

“No, that was later. It was eighth grade, when you had that huge crush on Maggie Spooner.”

Reggie yelps, slipping off his elbow and actually, physically cringing back into his bean bag. “Why would you bring that up? Like this wasn’t already embarrassing enough.”

“This was before the eighth-grade formal,” Alex assures him, and he would make a crack about Reggie’s in-hindsight very sweet serenade to Maggie on the middle of the gymnasium-turned-dancefloor, but Reggie looks like he could turn murderous if Alex doesn’t shift direction. “It was that one class we had with her, that Luke transferred out of –“

“Geometry,” Reggie says, resigned to the story now. Little does he know where it’s headed.

“Yeah, that one. I’d been over by the pencil sharpener talking to her about something, I don’t remember what –“ It had been about Reggie; Alex’s subconscious thoughts had already wandered in that direction enough times by that point that helping Reggie land a date with a girl seemed like the most important thing in the world, worth looking like an idiot in front of Maggie’s friends so long as it meant Alex could do the right, friendly thing for Reggie. “But I was walking back over to you, and you thought I was her, and you turned around and smiled at me and – that’s when I knew.”

It was actually a lot more catastrophically traumatic than he’s making it sound. That moment of ‘oh _shit’_ on seeing a smile meant for someone else is second only to the ‘oh _shit’_ of realizing yeah, that _was_ a new flavor, fuck. It had been immediately followed by a very silent, very acute anxiety attack, and Alex hadn’t been able to look Reggie _or_ Maggie in the face for days.

“Me?” Reggie says, startled out of his pout. He shouldn’t sound so shocked, really; Alex just assumes these days that he’s always been completely transparent to everyone, but Reggie does tend to undervalue himself.

“See, it is funny,” Alex says. “We were each other’s queer awakenings.”

“I guess I just always thought it would have been Luke.”

There is _definitely_ something there; Alex will eat one of his own drumsticks if _he_ is where Reggie’s bisexuality starts and ends.

“At thirteen? He was still just a scrawny, hyperactive kid. He didn’t become,” Alex searches for a word or a phrase to encompass Luke’s magnetic draw, his _Luke-ness_ that managed to ensnare Alex and apparently Reggie as well, and, finding nothing, settles on, “what he is, until like, fifteen.”

“Sixteen,” Reggie says, at the same time, and then immediately flushes guiltily. And yep, _there_ it is. Alex’s stick will live to drum another day.

Alex puts on his Listening Face. “So what happened next?”

He knows what happened next. Seems like his experience and Reggie’s continued to dovetail for a little bit past the awakening stage.

Reggie startles. Flinches maybe. “What do you mean? There is no next. I came to terms with it.”

So, another time, then. Probably when Luke isn’t just out of earshot on the couch below them, where he’s been banished because he talks in his sleep. “Okay, okay. We don’t have to talk about the Luke part right now if you don’t want to. But, you know, I’ve been there. If you ever do.”

“There is no Luke part,” Reggie says, stubbornly, and then adds, like he needs a justification, “he’s super into Julie.”

“Yeah, and that doesn’t mean there can’t still be a Luke part.” But Alex drops it. Reggie tries not to look visibly relieved and fails.

They don’t have to talk about the Luke part ever, really. If Reggie wants to work through whatever his feelings are about Luke on his own, that’s totally okay; that’s how Alex worked through them and that all turned out fine. But he _could_ help, and it’s not that he’s not grateful he gets to now, it’s just that if Reggie _knew…_

“Why didn't you say anything?

“I don’t know,” Reggie says, slowly, like he’s working through it as he speaks. “It just… didn’t seem like a big deal.”

Alex… kind of doesn’t get that. Because to him, it was a _huge_ deal; it took over his life for the better part of three years. But a pretty big part of _that_ was shame, and if by Alex coming out it meant that Reggie got to feel less of that shame, then yeah, okay, less of a big deal. Worth all the angst, maybe, if he could save Reggie some.

But then Reggie says, “I guess I just felt stupid. Like, you were so brave, and I knew that if I’d said anything you’d be there for me, and I didn’t. So then it felt like cheating to say it now, since I didn’t say it then.”

Alex laughs, because it’s laughable. “I wasn’t brave. Not like you were. I never said it.”

He just survived, that’s all. He could never find the guts to say it properly, but he made it through, and that’s good enough.

Suddenly, Reggie is leaning towards Alex across the bean bag and there are hands in his, and this close Alex can see his own sincerity reflected in Reggie’s face. “Yeah, you were, Alex.”

Alex shakes his head. This is Reggie’s coming out, not his; it’s Reggie’s turn to seek comfort and be given it.

“You _were._ It was 1994, and you didn’t know a single other gay kid our age, and Luke and I always made shitty jokes, and you still didn’t hide who you were. You would have said it eventually if we hadn’t taken your chance from you.”

Alex isn’t sure when this conversation became about him, but Reggie’s conviction soothes some hurt he didn’t realize he still felt. It’s been hard, a little bit, sometimes, to look at Julie and think how different his life would have been if he’d spent the last seventeen years of it in the present. If he could have been as brave and open as she is. He thinks Reggie might understand.

“You did make shitty jokes,” he allows, because even if Reggie _was_ comfortable with sincerity Alex isn’t sure _he_ is, in this moment. This is something he can talk about instead. “Now you just make bad ones.”

Reggie grins at him, and Alex knows Reggie knows. “I dunno, I think the one about you being into me aged pretty well.”

“Is this the part where we kiss?” Alex drawls, lifting his eyebrows comically high so Reggie can see it.

“You wish,” Reggie says, laughs, shoves him, and stays there, shoulder to shoulder in companionable silence. But of course, because he’s Reggie, it can’t last. “Man, poor Luke. Must be lonely to be the only straight person in the band.”

It’s an apology. For not saying something sooner, for not _knowing_ sooner – could be for anything. But Alex will take it, and he’ll forgive Reggie because just being there, just being honest, is the best thing Reggie has ever done for him. Reggie doesn’t need to apologize, but Alex loves him for doing it.

“There’s still time,” he says, though, because sincerity isn’t how the two of them do things. “We’ll get him yet.”

The darkness can’t hide Reggie’s blush. Alex is _so psyched_ to tease him about this.

Someday. For now, right now, this is their thing, and Alex is going to savor having someone who gets it for just a little while.


End file.
